by Daniel Stern
“Doesn’t know if it’s his place. Dr. Warsch—Carl, Max supports him, so is it his place or not?”
“I mean about him and this girl Annette.”
Carl lighted a cigarette, thinking: I like this part of my profession a little too much. I’ve got to be careful. I’m not a psychiatrist.
“Of course,” he said. “Families are always concerned about marriages the same way as they are about births and deaths.” Thinking: If my father hadn’t married a gentile girl, would I have become a rabbi?
“You see, Max,” Rose said, “I told you!” Then, to Carl: “He was a little ashamed to talk about it in front of you.”
The low table in front of them was littered with ashes and cigarette papers. She brushed them into a neat little pile absently.
“Not ashamed,” Max protested. “I’m just very anxious to know that I’m doing the right thing. I used to think, When I have money everything will straighten out. And now I have, but there’s still the question of the right and the wrong thing to do.”
“There will always be that question,” Carl said, feeling his tone, as he uttered the words, a little unctuous, pompous.
Elly entered the room and this time Carl stood immediately. She wore a long dinner dress and, for some perverse reason, no make-up at all. Her pale lips seemed almost the color of her hair, and she crossed and uncrossed her legs nervously when she sat down.
“Always be what question?” she asked.
“Of right and wrong,” Carl replied.
“Oh, not morality before dinner! Daddy, get me a drink will you? Old-fashioned.”
“It’s better than during dinner,” Carl said.
“That’s true.” She brushed away a strand of hair from her lips and sipped her drink.
With Elly in the room now, Max and Rose behaved as they did for “company” and chatted politely until it was time to go in for dinner. Mimi and Justin served but Rose was always jumping up and running into the kitchen for this or that.
During one of her trips Carl asked Max, “Is your wife very religious? She puts in a great deal of time at the temple.”
Max shook his head. “No, she’s not really, although more than me. She likes the temple and it keeps her busy—all this inter-faith activity that goes on. But I think any religious feeling she has is, if you’ll pardon the expression, superstition. You know, more the outward form, keeping a kosher home and all that. We go to synagogue only twice a year, as you’ll find out.”
“Don’t sound so apprehensive. I’m not going to convert anyone.” Carl laughed. “Most of my people come only on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. We get to expect it in the orthodox synagogue, especially in this part of the country.”
Rose re-entered. “So we’re not the-the—” she shrugged as she sat down—“but Elly used to go to Hebrew school, although she stopped after a while, and we keep a strictly kosher house. You can rest safely. Everything you eat here tonight is absolutely kosher.”
Carl smiled. “That’s very nice to know,” he said, “but it’s not the most important thing in the world. Some of the questions we were discussing earlier, intermarriage and so forth, are a lot more important than not eating pork or bacon.”
“Wouldn’t you think being a Jew in the world today is the most ridiculous thing imaginable?” Elly asked Carl.
Max clinked his spoon against his soup plate as Rose said, “What are you saying to the rabbi?”
“Oh, stop it, Mother! He doesn’t seem like a rabbi at all.”
“Thank you,” Carl said. “That’s a compliment. After all, this is the twentieth century. And we’re not in the old country. In a way it is ridiculous. What are we doing here in a Protestant country with most of us not interested in our religion, with no central sense of unity? When you were away at college did you think of yourself as a Jew, Elly?”
“Not especially. Only now and then. I thought of myself as—well, me.”
“No matter what you say, you’re still a Jew,” Rose told her daughter.
“Who said no?” Max said.
“And yet, at the crucial times,” Carl continued, “something like belonging to a specific group will come in mighty handy.” Suddenly he felt as if he were on trial—defending the liberal point of view before the Kaufmans, with a strong consciousness of Max Kaufman’s wealth and power in Colchester. “When you get right down to it,” he said, “being a Jew today means being human [it was a paraphrase of a speech he had given before the congregation when he had received the appointment to the synagogue] and Judaism means humanism. The outward forms—prayer, the Sabbath, keeping kosher-are all good things for a sense of tradition, of stability, but they’re not the essentials. The essentials are the moral precepts of Moses…. That was quite a speech.”
“Your soup is cold,” Rose said. “But you talk inspiring. Were you listening, Elly?”
“Yop.” And she had been. She’d listened and looked at his bobbing eyeglasses held in the long, bony fingers, agreeing with what he said as if it were something she had learned at school a long time ago, and trying to remember someone she had met who was something like Carl, and then seeing herself walking on the beach with Jay Gordon the pianist. But if Carl was like Jay and Carl was like Alec and Professor Lanner was like Alec—and all the faces began to blur and she found herself wondering what it would be like to make love to Jay. But Jay was like Carl and Carl like Alec, so was it Alec or Carl she wanted to make love to, or perhaps even the cruel Professor Lanner? One didn’t make love to a rabbi.
After dinner Max and Carl sat in Max’s study and talked, while they smoked Max’s cigars, their breath bluing the air, creating within the room an artificial night.
“You know it’s not just accident that we asked you over tonight, Carl,” Max said.
Carl nodded.
“Last night, I shifted in bed from one side to the other all night. It must be the beginning of insomnia. I couldn’t stand that.”
“I’ve never had it,” Carl said. “I always fall asleep right away.”
“So did I. But now—I remember I was thinking about the High Holidays coming and the fact that my brother Alec used to come home every year at this time. You know he’s an actor in Hollywood. He’s struggling and I help him. You were talking about Judaism and humanism. I have to help him. What can I do? He’s my brother. But he’s living with a gentile girl and I know he wants to marry her. If he did I would have to leave Rose before I could see him.”
“Does he—” Carl began, but Max continued.
“And Elly. She loves him like her own brother—like a father.”
“Yes, that’s important. She has to be considered. What would happen if you invited them both here for the holidays? Would your wife forbid that?”
“I don’t think so. As long as they’re not married she can handle it, I think. Do you recommend that they come? You see, whatever you say is very important, because Rose will probably do what you say. Just between you and me—and I can say this because I’m an older man than you—it’s very important for her, all these temple activities, because she wants to see us be as important in the community as she thinks my money entitles us. I don’t share this point of view, but I want to be honest with you and let you know that there are a lot of complicated things which make your opinion important to Rose—and to me too.”
Carl nodded slowly. He was slowly getting used to responsibilities such as these being thrust on him. His decision to take up a rabbinical career had come to him late in life, after he had finished a completely secular education at City College in New York. Colchester was only his second post, yet he was thirty-two years old. The act of advising people such as the Kaufmans, people at least twenty years older than himself, as to the ordering of their life, seemed, when he allowed himself to think about it, a trifle ludicrous. Now, however, he addressed himself to the problem with as little indecision as possible.
“I think it might be a good idea. I’d like to think about it, since you’ve done me the ho
nor, as your rabbi, of asking my advice. I’d like to talk to Elly about it and to your wife and generally think about it. You know I’ve had some experience in matters like this.”
“Good! I need your help and you don’t know how much my wife relies on your judgment. The first night she heard you speak at the temple she came home and raved. She said you had gray hair but you spoke like a very young man. I said you were probably prematurely gray.”
“Yes, I am, and it’s a good thing, too. Being a young rabbi is as difficult as being a young psychiatrist. Both, according to the popular fancy, should be born at the age of forty…. I’ll talk to Mrs. Kaufman and think about it.”
“Fine. I’ll do some work in the study and I’ll send Rose in to you here.”
Max left and Carl studied the room. He was never quite comfortable in this house. It was a too-extreme condition of living, too clearly defined, the ultimate clarity being, of course, the glass that was everywhere. And the incongruity of the Kaufmans living in this Harper’s Bazaar type of home troubled him. He’d always had difficulty in assimilating the incongruous, the greatest of them all being the fact of his parents’ mixed marriage. His mother was Welsh—name of Bixby—and had produced a son who was a rabbi. It was sometimes entirely out of mind, and at other times struck him with such a freshness and oddity that he very nearly turned to the person next to him wherever he might be, anxious to share the strangeness: “Guess what! Do you know that my—?” But of course he never did. It would have been professional suicide, especially in a small community like Colchester where the orthodox synagogue which he headed was struggling against the encroachments of the reformed temple, all of them fighting for the loyalty of the three-hundred-odd Jews who resided there.
Rose arrived and launched instantly into a tirade against her brother-in-law, who, it seemed, had been bleeding Max Kaufman white for years, bumming around in Hollywood on the pretense of being an actor.
“Isn’t he an actor?”
“An actor! You can appoint yourself an actor, too, if you want, and hang around Hollywood.”
“Has he ever appeared in a film?”
“Small parts. He wrote Max a month ago that he was getting a pretty good part in a new movie and he hoped it might be the beginning of independence for him.”
“Has he lived with this girl long? This Annette.”
“About three years.”
“How would you feel about it if both of them were to come here for the holidays?”
“No, no! I don’t need them here. If he can’t bring a Jewish girl he doesn’t have to come at all.” Rose paused. “Of course, seeing her here with us, with the family, he might see how she couldn’t fit in. I don’t know. What should I do, Carl?”
“I want to think about it for a while.” He stood up, thinking: Why am I always playing doctor? Who am I to advise anyone?
Rose was biting her lip and fidgeting. “What’s the matter?” he asked, slipping back into the role he’d been ready to discard for the day.
“It’s about Elly. I told you before supper how worried we are about her. Now, you mustn’t tell Max this—” Carl recoiled inwardly from the approaching responsibility—“I know why she decided to come to school at Crofts. She was pregnant. I wormed it out of Max. He didn’t want me to know. I’m ashamed to say it even—she had an abortion.”
Rose was crying and Carl was most thankful for the quietness of her sobs. He touched her shoulder, repelled by the roll of fat that met his comforting hand.
“There,” he said. “You’ve got good reason to be worried. But don’t be ashamed that you told me. It happens to more families than you know.”
Rose looked up at him and pushed at her hair. “It’s no wonder I’m so sick all the time,” she said. “Look what I have on my mind. And she lies and she’s so unhappy here. Would you talk to her?”
Everyone wants me to talk to Elly, Carl thought. All right, I’ll talk to her.
“Certainly I will. I don’t know how much good I can do, but I’ll try to help.”
Rose stared at him with wide eyes and an insane look of expectancy and hope. “That’s wonderful,” she said, “that’s wonderful!” in such a manner as to make him instantly sorry that he had agreed to anything at all.
Max arranged for him to see Elly privately the next day. When he entered the living room she was at the piano, struggling with a Brahms intermezzo. It was one that Carl knew and he could tell immediately that she was making a hash of it. It wasn’t only that she couldn’t negotiate the notes but that she played the most lyrical and liquid passages with great stiffness. It sounded carefully mechanical. She heard him, stopped suddenly and turned around on the stool.
“How long have you been there?” she asked accusingly.
“Only a moment.”
“Well, don’t say it was nice, because it’s awful.”
“I wasn’t going to say it was nice. Don’t you expect sincerity from people?”
“Do you?”
“I try to.”
“To expect it or to be sincere?”
“Both. That’s one of my favorites, that intermezzo.”
Elly drew the last breath of smoke from her cigarette and crushed it violently into the ash tray.
“I’m in an ugly mood,” she said. “Yes, I heard a pianist play it in Los Angeles last year and I can’t seem to forget it, so I finally got the music. He made a recording of it but I couldn’t get it here in town. I sent to New York for it and in the meantime I kick it around myself. I’m sorry, I forgot to ask you to sit down, Rabbi.”
Carl sat down in a low-slung chair which he found rather uncomfortable, and with some difficulty crossed his legs. He lighted his pipe and said, “You’re not going to call me Rabbi, are you? I mean I’m neither a Catholic priest nor one of the old-fashioned rabbis from Europe—what they used to call a ‘rev’.”
“All right, Carl,” she said. “If you’re not a Catholic priest or an old rev, don’t act like one. Don’t tell me what to do or what not to do. That is why they asked you to talk to me, isn’t it?”
“Your parents are worried about you, but I have no intention of telling you what to do. I’m not that smart. I’m good enough to tell older people what to do, not young people.”
“Bravo! That was good.”
“I was brought up in a city so big that everybody more or less minds his own business.”
“Where?”
“New York.”
“New York?” Elly scraped her chair along the floor and stopped next to Carl. “I was there last Christmas. It’s a wonderful city. Where did you live?”
“Morningside Heights.”
“Oh, yes, that’s a lovely section.” She had never heard of it before.
“It was nice,” Carl said, remembering the autumn-morning walks along the river and the blind-eyed statues watching over the green benches.
“Why did you ever leave it to come here!” Elly exclaimed. “I’ll never understand why.” She leaned forward in her chair, her head close to his. She liked the odor of his pipe, more because it was so appropriate to the kind of talk they were having than anything else.
“Well, it’s hard to say. There were so many reasons, yet none of them adds up to a real reason.” It had been so long since he had talked to anyone about the days on Morningside Heights. “My father taught at Columbia University. Comparative religion and philosophy.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you know Professor Lanner at Crofts.”
“Yes, I do. I was at a cocktail party at his home the other day. I left early.” He smiled at her.
“Then you knew I hadn’t been there.”
“I left early, I said. You could have come later on for a little while.”
“But you know I didn’t.”
He nodded and asked, “Why did you say you’d been there?”
“I don’t know. I really have no idea why I say some of the things I do. Do you know why you say everything you do?”
“No. For example, I d
on’t know why I’ve been telling about my life in New York. Except that I was so happy there. I remember the big stone steps leading up to the library on the campus. I used to feel they symbolized courage. I would walk up them slowly, imagining music playing as I walked. Great brass chords.”
“Oh, did you? That’s what I’ve always felt. That there should be music all the time. Like what you just described.”
“I didn’t feel it all the time. Just then, for courage.”
“Did you live there long?”
“Fifteen years.”
“That is a long time. And then you became a rabbi.”
“Not until much later. I was going to be a teacher. I never thought of being a rabbi because my mother wasn’t Jewish. She was—” He stopped suddenly, thinking: What am I doing, telling all this to a child? One word from her could ruin me.
“She was what?” Elly asked blithely.
“Welsh,” Carl said bluntly, realizing it was too late.
“Yes. I can see it a little in the eyes.”
“Don’t joke. You’d better not be able to see it in the eyes. Listen, young lady, you’re never to mention what I just told you about my mother. Never.”
“I don’t see what’s so terrible. Just because your parents were a mixed marriage. My Uncle Alec’s going to marry a gentile girl.”
“But he’s not a rabbi. Please promise me you won’t say a word. Ever.”
“All right, Carl. I promise. I’m glad you came. I like talking to you.”
And I, thought Carl, like talking to you a little too much. Why on earth did I tell her, when I haven’t mentioned it to anyone in years? “Good,” he said. “I’m glad. Then let’s do it again, shall we?”
“All right, Carl.”
“I’ll call you.”
It was as if he were making a date with a girl friend.
Max was pleased to hear that Elly liked Carl and was going to see him again. He was a little annoyed, however, at Carl’s delaying in giving his advice, like a too-careful judge. But Rose insisted on waiting.
“I don’t know what to do,” Max told Elly. “The thing I’m really worried about is that Alec might grow into a stranger.”
